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So You Still Want to Choose Your Senator?

Few members of the Tea Party have endorsed Rand Paul’s misgivings about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but a surprising number are calling for the repeal of an older piece of transformative legislation: the 17th Amendment. If you don’t have the Constitution on your smartphone, that’s the one adopted in 1913 that provides for direct popular election of United States senators.

Allowing Americans to choose their own senators seems so obvious that it is hard to remember that the nation’s founders didn’t really trust voters with the job. The people were given the right to elect House members. But senators were supposed to be a check on popular rowdiness and factionalism. They were appointed by state legislatures, filled with men of property and stature.

A modern appreciation of democracy — not to mention a clear-eyed appraisal of today’s dysfunctional state legislatures — should make the idea unthinkable. But many Tea Party members and their political candidates are thinking it anyway, convinced that returning to the pre-17th Amendment system would reduce the power of the federal government and enhance state rights.

Senate candidates have to raise so much money to run that they become beholden to special interests, party members say. They argue that state legislators would not be as compromised and would choose senators who truly put their state’s needs first.

Around the country, Tea Party affiliates and some candidates have been pressing for repeal — though there also has been a lot of hasty backtracking by politicians once the voters realized the implications. In Idaho, two candidates in last month’s Republican primary for the First District House seat said they favored repeal, including the winner, Raul Labrador. Steve Stivers, the Republican candidate in an Ohio Congressional race, said he wanted to repeal the amendment, until his Democratic opponent, Representative Mary Jo Kilroy, made an issue of it, after which he seemed to back off.

Utah, the only state that refused to ratify the amendment, remains a particular hotbed of prelapsarian sentiment. Tim Bridgewater, who ousted Senator Robert Bennett of Utah as the Republican candidate in that race, blasts the 17th Amendment on his Web site: “We traded senators who represent rights of states for senators who represent the rights of special interest groups.”

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The Utah State Senate, which seems to have been fuming at the loss of its power for the last 97 years, approved a bill in March reminding the political parties that they are welcome to consult with legislators when choosing candidates for the United States Senate, especially in regard to their feelings about states’ rights and federalism.

Fortunately, repeal will never happen. Still, there is something bracing in the eccentric quest of these advocates, who may know their constitutional history better than most Americans.

To Madison, Hamilton and most of the other authors of the Constitution, allowing states to appoint the Senate was the linchpin of the entire federalist system and the real reason there are two houses of Congress. It may be true that appointed senators, accountable only to state legislators, would never approve of many useful federal mandates designed to put the national interest above local parochialism — including everything from the minimum wage to the new health care reform law.

Not enough Americans vote. But, fortunately, almost all like the idea that they can, a thoroughly modern sentiment that will confine this elitist notion to the fringes. That means Tea Partiers who are infuriated by the health care law and everything else now going on in Washington can no longer look to James Madison for a bailout. Their best remedy is the one they seem to spurn: a vote at the ballot box.

A version of this editorial appears in print on June 1, 2010, on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: So You Still Want to Choose Your Senator?. Today's Paper|Subscribe